press release<\/a>, the portal will close indefinitely after the final March 1-7 application period and the remaining dollars will be redirected to negotiated eviction settlements.<\/p>\nThis follows City Council’s adoption of the Fiscal Year 2026 budget last fall, which reduced funding from $4 million to $3 million. <\/p>\n
Founded in 2023, I Belong In Austin is an application-based rental assistance program that provided 725 households with support in Fiscal Year 2025 and 139 households to date in Fiscal Year 2026. City partner El Buen Samaritano found that many applicants were already facing active eviction filings when they applied.<\/p>\n
Therefore, the city believes that concentrating funds on legal advocacy and negotiated settlements will allow the city and partners to prioritize households facing the most immediate threat of losing their homes. <\/p>\n
March will be the final month of rental assistance disbursement, while the support through negotiated eviction settlements will continue through the end of the fiscal year.<\/p>\n
“At present, we must prioritize options that can have maximum impact in terms of stabilizing households,” said Nefertitti Jackmon, community displacement prevention officer for Austin Housing. “As a result, we will assist households needing legal representation to avoid eviction.”<\/p>\n
Jackmon continued, “We hope this approach will lessen the burden and expectations of thousands of households applying for rent assistance each month who are ultimately denied because the resources cannot meet the increasing demand for financial assistance.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This week, the City of Austin announced a “strategic shift” for the I Belong in Austin emergency rental…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":184120,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[132,134,133],"class_list":{"0":"post-184119","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-austin","8":"tag-austin","9":"tag-austin-headlines","10":"tag-austin-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184119\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/184120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}